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Caldera Open Linux

I have been working with Linux since around 1992, both at home and at work. I have probably seen it all with exception of item in the title. Lurking around my files, there was a screenshot of a beta version of Caldera Linux. As time passed I somehow never managed to see it with my own eyes so for me it’s features were always covered by myths and legends.

Recently I came across install media for the OS and decided to to see how was it like for real. The system installed just fine through series of tubes^H^H^H err dialog based setup steps which were common at the time. However as I wanted to see the GUI in action there was a problem – 640×480 VGA mode, or rather lack of better video mode to work with.

Unfortunately neither VMware nor VirtualBox do not support anything better than the crippled VGA mode. They do it for all other devices, like network card, mouse, ide and atapi cdrom. But somehow not for graphics. Fortunately the other virtualization engines are bit better. QEMU supports Cirrus Logic and Virtual PC supports S3 Trio.

I have spent several hours trying to convince the ancient Xfree86 to work with QEMU, to no avail. All I managed t o get was this:

Out of options I have decided to try Virtual PC. Unfortunately the system would not install due to disk errors. Upon some research I’ve found the issue was IO-APIC which I promptly disabled in the kernel (noacpi). It did not help the install much, but allowed me to run a qemu-installed and converted disk image. This is a bit of shame that the best virtualization engine to run ancient Linux was Microsoft VPC. Anyway to my amusement I’ve got this:

And I was able to explore the GUI a little bit more:

Wait a second, these icons remind me of something! Apparently Visix Looking Glass became Caldera Desktop… I will need to dig in deeper in to this eventually.

Apart from that Caldera is loaded with tons of ancient software. Pretty much everything there was available on Linux these days and all working out of the box. Neozeed will be happy to see Neko in action (see the last screenshot)!

Update 2:Michal Necasek of OS2 Museum has fixed XF86_SVGA so that it works correctly with Virtual Box in higher resolutions as well. “You’ll have to set up the X so that it uses the XF86_SVGA server and tell it to automatically detect the graphics hardware. Then it should be just a question of selecting some sensible monitor and creating a few modes. If things are configured properly, you’ll see something like “SVGA: chipset: boxv” in the X server output.“. Download here.

that was before cde became open-source. not to mention the one on github is cool and all, but has a *lot* more quirks than this old version. but at least i can fix them myself (to a degree) by altering the makefiles..

“WIll check if they have it for Looking Glass Desktop.” I doubt it was there, Tenox. I looked into the second cd myself and never found it. I did do some digging and I heard Looking Glass’s source code was never released by Caldera. Also, they don’t release proprietary software without permission. The second cd only contains free software licensed by the GPL. Correct me if I’m wrong.

well, i have to admit, you were right. this system is a bi@tch to install.. it can’t see any storage devices in vmware player (module loading helps), then it thinks it’s on the wrong architecture. same in virtualbox, and refuses to format the virtual hard disk in qemu-system-i386..

no matter which virtualisation software i use, it refuses to install lilo (complaining about missing menu items).

This reminds me of my own copy of OpenLinux. I have 1.3 running on my old pc. By the way, what version is this? I have a blog post about OpenLinux as well. Its the version including the first KDE desktop environment.

I ran into the same problem getting RedHat 6.0 running, mostly because I wanted to run Sun WABI…. which was ported to x86 Linux by Caldera. The problem is I only have WABI in RPM format… RPM 1.0 format to be exact. Newer versions of rpm found in later more VM friendly versions of Linux will refuse to open up early packages.

The bigger problem is qemu and VirtualBox only fully emulate a genericish VBE3.0 video card. qemu’s Cirrus support is far from perfect while VPC’s S3 Trio support is the most compatible by far. Back in the day, nothing really worked right with VBE drivers past 640x480x256 colors. Video cards of the time period usually had VBE1.2 support in their ROMs and usually buggy at that. XFree86 was notoriously picky about video cards and RAMDACs, which didn’t help matters either (remember dot clock hell in XF86Config?).

I’ll have to give it a try. Hopefully I didn’t delete the qemu image I installed Linux+WABI on! I also have a rpm for the Looking Glass Desktop 1.0 somewhere. You forgot to mention that OpenLinux has a Tetris game on one of the consoles to keep you occupied while it installs. 😛 My only experience with Caldera back in the day was the Lite version of this distribution. Commercial software like Looking Glass and that crisp text editor were all time limited demo versions.

Chris M., the part where you can play the tetris game during install was only present in Caldera OpenLinux 2-3 (I can’t confirm that OL 3 had that feature too since I don’t have it). Unfortunately, its not present in OpenLinux 1 as the LISA installer was text-based only.

The copy of OpenLinux Lite that I have is dated 3/97 and only used the text based LISA installer. The tetris game is on one of the virtual consoles accessible via Alt+Fn. Just about every early Linux distro showed debug and detailed install messages and errors on virtual consoles, but Caldera went the extra step and included a game.

Chris M, did you happen to find something related to Looking Glass in /COL/SOURCES/SRPMS in your copy of OpenLinux lite? The file is LG-EVAL-.RPM. I believe that may be Looking Glass’s source code. I’m not too sure, however. Looking into the archive, it has lots of .do files and some .h files. Some are binaries as well. I recently picked up my copy of OpenLinux Lite 1.1 yesterday.

It’s not “fixed”, it’s “enhanced”. It’s exactly the same XF86_SVGA X server that came with Caldera Linux 1.3 with the addition of a simple driver for the graphics chip implemented in VirtualBox (which I call “boxv”). The difference is support for higher resolutions and color depths when running on VirtualBox.

The link for xf86-boxv seems to have expired. Is it possible that it’ll get a permanent home somewhere? The other day I found a hard drive image with Corel Linux 1.0 on, and it too can only manage 640×480 in 16 colours on VirtualBox.

Thanks: that worked on Corel 1.0 and a couple of other distros of similar vintage that I tried it on.

Of course, I realised after posting that if I could get networking and XDMCP working on the guest machines, I could then use a command like Xnest -broadcast :1 on the host to get whatever size and colour depth of display I wanted. So I’ve now got that working as well.

(One pitfall with Redhat 6.0 and XDMCP: I needed to set the login screen to xdm rather than gdm, because the supplied gdm doesn’t support XDMCP — the settings are in the configuration file, but they don’t do anything).

I’m trying to get OpenLinux v2.3 running on Qemu 1.6.0 – Everything installs OK depending on which configuration i pick – but all my X fonts seem to be missing in KDE file manager windows and at the XDM(?) logon screen. I’ve had similar problems with other Linux from that era.

Any pointers?

And yes I’d be happy to make the iso available, It’s one I bought many years back from Cheapbytes…

You got farther than I did. I managed to install 2.2 in VBox, but just like with RedHat 5/6/7/8/9, the monitor settings are incompatible with VBox. (and VMware in fact) So, whenever I boot it up, I get no xsession, and an unusable console.
I made a video of my attempt…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue0MHgK_JzM&list=UUlG53a_UEcgrTDGqueYNhIQ
Install seemed to go fine, but, like I said, monitor settings seem to be off upon boot.
Whatever it uses for the installer works just fine. I wish I knew what that was!!

So I think the key lies in finding out the configuration used in the installer.

HI, i am a novice for the LINUX, i ran into a book on How to teach linux in 24 hrs. It contained a cd as it was an e-book so couldn’t figure out the cd. Can anyone send me or guide me from where to obtain it (Caldera Openlinux 2.2)

I know I’m really late to the game with this, but I think I’ve found a solution to the QEMU fonts issue you guys had. Try adding the options “no_bitblt” and “sw_cursor” to the Device section for the Cirrus card in the XF86Config file.

These two options worked for me when I had what looks to be the same problem not long ago when installing an old version of Debian (a modified version of 1.3 that dates back to late 1997) in QEMU. It took me quite a bit of digging before I found it, but I eventually found the solution to both of the problems in a readme file for the Cirrus Logic X driver. The readme was referred to in the autogenerated XF86Config file, so I really should have found the solutions sooner!

According to the readme, I think the core of the problem was a bug in the XFree86 Acceleration Architecture, which the authors specifically mention was new and in beta status. I’d be willing to bet that the version included in OpenLinux is close to what’s in Debian 1.3.